Learning to Swear in America (33 page)

“The Persians invaded Greece. They had like a hundred eighty thousand men, and the Greeks had maybe five thousand gathered
on the shore, watching the Persians getting off their ships. And there were like a million of them.”

“Their forces just increased almost five hundred percent.”

“Do not,” Lennon said, “do a statistical analysis of my story.” Yuri shrugged. “So anyway, being Greek, their generals voted on whether to stay and fight, or run like hell. There were ten generals, and the vote was five to five. So the head general turned to Callimachus, and …”

“He was this official,” Dovie said. “He had the tie-breaking vote, but nobody thought he’d ever have to use it—certainly not with Western civilization hanging in the balance.”

“Thank you for telling my story, Dovie.”

“Welcome.”

“So anyway, he turns to him and says, ‘With you it rests, Callimachus.’”

“And Callimachus voted to run as hell?”

“No, he voted to fight, and inexplicably they beat the Persians and saved democracy. That was the Battle of Marathon, dude.”

“Never heard of it.”

Lennon bugged his eyes out.

“You know, if I’d spent my time studying history, your frozen blue ass would be orbiting Pluto about now.”

“Fair point,” Lennon said. His eye held Yuri’s. “I always thought that was the most pressure anybody’s ever been under. I mean, the Persians were
getting off the boats
. They were
right there
. But now there’s you.”

They ate.

“You believe in God, yes?” Yuri said.

Lennon and Dovie exchanged a glance.

“Yeah,” Dovie said. “I guess.”

“If God exists, why didn’t he stop asteroid?” Yuri said.

“Maybe he did,” Lennon said. “Maybe you’re the tool he used. Not that you’re a tool.”

“You’d think being atheist would have gotten me out of that,” Yuri said. “Anyway, I was thinking more like giant medieval shield. Would have made great eclipse.”

“If it had hit, would that have been Armageddon?” Dovie said. “Do you think there’d have been a Second Coming of Christ?”

“Oh, great,” Yuri said. “That’s just what I need. Jesus was on Earth and I screwed up his plans. There’ll be like fifteen-foot-tall pissed-off Jesus coming after me.”

“Don’t forget his death-ray eyes,” Dovie said.

They passed the ice cream around.

“Do you think there will be a Second Coming?” Dovie said.

Yuri licked the back of his spoon. “Maybe there already was. What if he came again in 1943? They’d have put him in Dachau. Maybe they threw him in cattle car, made him wear striped pajamas, and finally gassed him in shower.”

They stared at him.

Yuri shrugged. “What? It’s kind of thing that would happen to him.”

“That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,” Dovie said.

“You know, he’s gonna be really pissed if this was his second
attempt at a Second Coming,” Lennon said. “That, and what happened to his relatives.”

“Watch out for Godzilla Jesus,” Dovie said. “Better look both ways before you cross the street.”

“You live in such three-dimensional world,” Yuri said.

“Um, yes. Yes, I do.”

“Hand me the ice cream again before Jezilla shows up, would you?” Lennon said.

Yuri held the carton up while Lennon carved out a gigantic scoop.

“So anyway, we have an escape plan for you,” Lennon said, then put the spoon in his mouth.

“Yeah? What is it?”

“We weren’t sure we should get you out,” Lennon said around the mouthful of mint chip. “Might be unpatriotic.”

“We wanted to help,” Dovie said apologetically. “We just had to think whether we should.”

“You didn’t learn anything here that would help the Russians invade or anything, right?” Lennon said.

“Actually, yes. If we can cut off your pizza supply, we can bring you to your knees.”

“Sounds about right,” Lennon said. “But I don’t think that was a secret. Anyway, since you saved our lives, and also, you know, America, it seemed wrong not to help.”

“Where I live is my decision,” Yuri said. He ran his spoon around the edge of the carton, where the mint chip had melted to a pale green liquid. “So what are we going to do?”

Lennon explained. Yuri frowned, listening, making occasional objections. When Lennon was done, Yuri tapped the wooden neck of his spoon on the toe of his shoe.

“This isn’t great plan.”

“No,” Dovie said. “Can you think of a better one?”

Yuri sighed.

“If it doesn’t work, they’ll know I’m trying to get out. They’ll probably give me more guards. A second attempt would be harder.”

“That’s going to be true no matter what we try,” Dovie said. “It needs to work the first time.”

They left the ice cream carton on the roof, three spoons plunged in like Greek spears in the sand.

“I wish I had better idea if this would work,” Yuri said as he walked to the elevator. “I’d like to calculate probabilities.”

“Some things aren’t mathematically calculable,” Lennon said.

“Not things worth knowing.”

“Do you want to know what I feel like pressed against you?” Dovie said.

“Um. Yes, please.”

“But you can’t calculate that.”

“Actually, I could. If I knew the density of your tissue, and the force with which it was applied to my mechanoreceptors …”

“Yuri, this is where you shut up and take me in your arms.”

“Okay. That’s another way to do it. It’s just I’m more theoretical than experimental.”

“Time to hit the lab, Science Boy.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat and put his arms around her.

“Shouldn’t there be a control?” Lennon said, hitting the elevator button. “You should hug me, too.”

“Can you calculate the force with which I’m going to slap him?” Dovie said.

“Gonna be damn lot of Newtons per square centimeter,” Yuri said.

“You shoulda gone with ‘hell’ in that situation, but you’re improving,” Lennon said.

“Ignore him, and apply your lips to my mechanoreceptors. Or something like that,” Dovie said.

So Yuri kissed her.

“First there was my tragic accident,” Lennon said. “Now I see this.”

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor, and Lennon pressed a thumb on the door’s “open” button.

“By the way, the government might not pay for the porn flicks you ordered, so you may get stuck with the tab.”

Yuri stared at him.

“I left your TV on. Figured if your zookeepers heard the luscious groans of
Bambi and the Firefighters
, they’d be more likely to leave you alone. Especially now that you have a documented history of self-gratification,” Lennon said, miming opening a book.

“See you at five,” Dovie said. She tented her fingers on Yuri’s chest and gently pushed him out of the elevator, and the doors closed while he was still staring at Lennon.

Yuri took his pen from his jacket pocket and rolled it down the hall. It stopped between his door and Decker’s. He ran low, below the level of the peepholes, gently inserted his key card, and clicked his door open. He slipped inside and was facing out from his room, reaching for the pen, by the time Decker cracked his door open.

“Found it.” Yuri held up the pen and smiled, and slipped back into the room.

A moment later he heard Decker’s bolt click shut again. He stood with his back to the door and exhaled.

Yuri’s watch alarm beeped at 4:30 a.m. He hit it instantly, then lay still for five minutes in case the sound had carried into one of the guards’ rooms. He got up, dressed in the new suit, and collected the belongings he’d packed the night before: a single suitcase and his book bag.

He had slept without the chain on the door, but had thrown the dead bolt by habit of residence in one of the world’s largest cities. He eased it back now, slowly, and it clicked as it returned to its housing. He stood silently for another five minutes, looking out the peephole. Finally he rotated the doorknob, grateful that it wasn’t a lever style. He opted for smooth and steady, and when the tongue was completely retracted, he slipped a stock card advertisement for a local restaurant between the tongue and its groove. He
pushed his suitcase into the hall with his foot and shut the door behind him. The tongue hit the card and didn’t snap home. No noise.

Yuri picked up his suitcase and ducked under Linares’s peephole, just in case, then walked down the hall with what he hoped was the confident stride of a typical American teenage physicist checking out of a hotel at 4:45 a.m. He trotted down the stairwell closest to the lobby, thinking that if he had awakened a guard, that’s the last point of egress they’d check. He left the hotel through the pool room, the chlorine stench sharp, the concrete still damp from the previous evening’s swimmers. He felt alive, his stomach and fingertips tingling with adrenaline. He was free, and ready to fight to stay that way.

And then he was outside and alone.

The sky was lightening in the east as he made his way to the rendezvous point, a gas station a block down. Dovie’s green-and-yellow car was waiting, parked facing the building. Yuri tossed his bags in the backseat next to Lennon, then stood with his hand on the door.

“I’m going to run in and use toilet. I’ll be right back.”

“We’ve got to go,” Dovie said. “Get in here.”

“You shoulda gone before you left, man,” Lennon said.

“I couldn’t flush. It might have awakened guard.”

“Yeah, but you coulda
gone
,” Lennon said.

“And not flush?” Yuri looked horrified.

“Sure. Given the circum—”

“Listen, I didn’t save world so people can go around not
flushing.” He swung the door shut and disappeared into the gas station.

“Unbelievable,” Lennon said.

Three minutes later, Dovie herded the car onto the road away from the hotel. Fifteen minutes after that, they swung through an exit and were on the highway, heading for the Ambassador Bridge and beyond it, Canada. Yuri sat hunched forward, peering through the windshield. He was anxious, but he was moving, and there was something exhilarating about it.

“Mom sent some muffins,” Dovie said. “Pass them up, Lennon.”

Lennon handed a box forward.

Yuri popped the lid and looked inside. He lifted a muffin.

“Chocolate?”

“Carbon,” Dovie said.

“Even I can’t save these.” He put the box on the seat. “Tell your mother ‘thank you.’”

The route from the hotel to the bridge covered eighteen miles of strip malls and fast-food joints. Detroit’s cityscape was like a dementia patient’s brain—there were places where connections were needed, but there was nothing but a burned hole. Rain began to fall, lightly but steadily, and Dovie fishtailed twice.

“I think my tires are bald,” Dovie said.

“You should buy her new tires,” Lennon said. “And some counseling for me. We drove all the way from Pasadena, man. Do you know what it’s like to ride with Dovie all the way from Pasadena?”

“It was good driving experience,” Dovie said. “I think I might be ready to test for my license.”

Yuri rubbed his forehead, and then decided to change the subject.

“So we just drive over bridge? And when we get to checkpoint at far end, we explain I need to go to Russian embassy, that it’s emergency?”

“Yep,” Dovie said.

“And what if they don’t let us drive on through?”

“They probably won’t,” Dovie said. “You’ll probably have to go forward on your own.”

Yuri looked out the rain-streaked window.

“I’ll miss you both.”

“Yeah. You better.”

“There’s a pretty reasonable chance they’ll take you off and question you for a while,” Lennon said. “Just keep demanding to speak to the Russian ambassador. He should be in Ottawa, which isn’t very far. Shouldn’t be too difficult.” Yuri nodded. “The important thing is that you’ll be on Canadian soil.”

Yuri pulled a folded conference schedule from his jacket pocket and wrote his address and phone numbers and e-mail on it. He handed Lennon the paper and pen, and Lennon wrote the Collums’ contact information, and then ripped the paper in half. Yuri gave him a thin smile and shoved the folded paper in his pants pocket.